My SEO partner and I met with a prospective client today - and it’s a good thing we met at her shop!

Based on her existing website and the new, 28-page website that some designer has been building for her for the last 12 months (I kid you not), my assumptions about the business were pretty solid. To my surprise, I walked in the door and see something totally different!

This woman and her husband have an interesting, viable and serious business going on but the impression one gets from both her old and in-progress websites is that of a lone hobbyist.

She asked, at the conclusion of our meeting, whether we could help her with presenting a true and accurate picture of her business and getting it found on Google. Our answer was: of course. This is what we do for a living.

When she told us about the current designer, what he has and has not done, and what he’s convinced them of, I mentally shook my head. It’s sad when small businesses are taken advantage of this way; the designer is building them a site that’s not standards-compliant, valid, accessible, or search engine-friendly and says absolutely nothing about the true nature of their work.

And the fact that this redesign experience has gone on for a year now… I just want to help this company. I really do. I think they could be a strong competitor in their industry in our region - if more people knew about them and understood what they really do.

1) Make your site more search engine-friendly.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a must, not a ‘maybe,’ if you want your business site to be found in Google. If you have a great-looking site that no one can find, it’s not doing its job.

2) Add a blog or podcast to your site.

If you like to talk (or write) about your business and you’re good at what you do, a blog or podcast may be just the thing. Both of them do one thing very well – they encourage visitors to come back to your site again and again. And they’re so easy to use! (I’m a huge fan of Wordpress). Blogs give you the advantage of adding a new page of fresh content to your site every time you post, while a podcast is like having your very own radio show.

3) Remove a blog from your site.

That might sound odd – but if you have a business blog and haven’t committed the time and effort to post fairly regularly, it’s probably better *not* to have one at all. If your last post was in 2005, consider removing the link to the blog for the time being. It reflects poorly on your company and makes it look like you don’t keep up with things.

4) Write articles about your industry.

Whether you’re a retailer, an architect, or a coach, you have a unique take on your business. Writing articles about it that you can both publish to the many free article syndication sites and post on your own website or blog both establish your expertise and create links back to your site - which Google likes a lot.

5) Give your site a makeover.

If your site is more than a couple of years old, or if it’s never had a facelift, now is the time. A more modern look and feel can give your site new life and make a better first impression. In addition, a redeveloped site can often benefit search engines and human visitors too, with cleaner, leaner code, faster loading times, and easier updating and maintenance.

6) Learn more about your visitors.

Google Analytics is a traffic analysis tool that does much more than just tell you how many people are visiting your site. You can learn, among other things: how much time they spend on each page; what navigation paths they follow through your site; where they come in and leave; what part of the country they’re in; and what links on your home page they’re clicking on. If you use Adwords for PPC marketing you can also learn how much revenue each product on your site is earning and how many have been sold in any given period. Google Analytics is free and easy to use.

7) Break up your content.

Even if you already have a lot of good content on your site, breaking it up into bite-size chunks is always a good way to increase readability. Studies show that people don’t often read websites – they scan them. Think headlines, bullet lists, pull quotes and short paragraphs rather than long uninterrupted text.

(Yes I know this is a lot of uninterrupted text but this isn’t my website. This is for readers, not scanners…)

Change the copyright date.

Don’t forget to change (or have someone change for you) the date on the copyright notice that should be at the bottom of your web pages. No, that won’t help you get more visitors, but it looks unprofessional if you forget to do it!

9) Make the product look great.

If you’re selling products, and the images aren’t that fantastic, consider having them redone by a professional. It makes a big difference in the credibility of your site and gives the buyer more confidence that the product will really meet their needs.

10) Consider video.

If you’re selling a product or provide a service that could benefit from visual instruction, think about having a short how-to video made. They’re easy to post on your website, and can do double-duty for your traffic if you also post them on sites like YouTube or Google Video.

I’m on a mailing list with a group of professional women designers and developers. There’s lots of conversation flowing and it occasionally turns very lively - as it did yesterday when a member posted about her frustration with CSS and continuing attachment to tables. It ignited a veritable firestorm of commentary! It was fun to read, but it did help me clarify a few reasons that I love CSS and think it’s worth the time of any web professional to learn it. Note I didn’t say ‘master’ it, because I don’t think there are a whole lot of people that can do that, but learning? That’s one of the reasons I’m in this profession, because I like to be challenged.

Anyway here are five things that I think are major advantages of CSS over tables:

1. You can put things where you want them. When I was using tables I used to get so frustrated with having to line things up under the cells above them and split cells into more tables and more cells just to get the layout to work the way I wanted it too. With CSS and absolute positioning, relative positioning and floats, I don’t have to think in advance how I’m going to slice up my design to fit - I can put elements where I want them to go. As a designer this was the key reason I switched to CSS in the first place.
2. Shorter code. Now for a small page it doesn’t make a lot of difference as far as the length of code. But I worked on one client’s site (70+ pages) where every page was full of nested table after nested table after nested table. Cleaning up one of those pages - converting it from tables to CSS - often meant a reduction from 1,000 or more lines of code to 400 or less. Over the entire site, that’s a huge difference. The pages load faster, they take up less room on the server. Not a benefit for SEO, but certainly a big one for users with slower connections.
3. Content first may be better for SEO. With tables, the page is read by the search engine in the order it appears in the code and presented that way on the page. But with CSS and positioning, I can put my big headline and block of content up near the top of the page and drop the navigation, header, sidebar and footer to the bottom. That means that Google gets to the meat of the page right away instead of wading through a lot of code.
4. Easier maintenance. Having rewritten the aforementioned table-based site, I can tell you it can be a nightmare trying to keep track of multiple nested divs on a 1,000-line page. Once the site is converted to CSS, maintaining it (either yourself, your client or another web developer) is so much easier, faster, and cost-efficient.
5. Better for your clients. I firmly believe that not providing a client with clean, well-written code is a big disservice. They’re paying you to be a professional and CSS is a professional’s tool (just one of them, but a key one). When you provide a client with a well-built site that allows them to change the entire look and feel of their website experience with just a little work, rather than a redesign, that’s huge.

I will now step off my little soapbox and slide it back under the table.

I know that learning CSS can be tough; I liked the challenge (one of the reasons I’m in this profession) but I certainly wouldn’t call it intuitive. However, taking the stand that one is not going to learn it because it’s just not that important, that I can’t understand at all.

Tables have their place, for display of tabular data, but they were not intended to be a layout device.

I had the privilege of being interviewed for a large article published over the summer on the IT Business Net site. The article is by Edith Schindler and is entitled “Becoming Clueful: What You Should Know Before You Redo Your Web Site.”

This is a big one, but it’s something I recommend that all my clients read if we’re doing a web design makeover. It’s a discussion among designers and developers about what to ask, what to expect (and what not to expect), and what they wished clients understood about our business.

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We have a retail website, Silver Fantasy, that’s been around since 1998. It’s well-ranked for its top search terms in the major search engines, has a good client base and has been very successful for us.

The problem was that it was a static site - with over 1,000 items. Keeping track of prices, out-of-stock and discontinued items was a huge pain in the neck. So this summer we rebuilt the site using a nice PHP and MySQL database.
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